A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict. The passage appears in Our Virginia: Past and Present, which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Yeah, OK. What the author calls "Internet research," historians and academics call "lazy research." Blacks weren't a part of the Confederate History Month proclamation, but we're omnipresent as Confederate soldiers. Can you say creative license? Not to let Masoff off the hook, but who on earth is choosing the textbooks for the school system? It's a safe bet that it is someone who isn't a historian either.